stealth

Navy Bets On ‘Baby Steps’ To Improve Electronic Warfare; F-35 Jamming Not Enough

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PENTAGON: While the Air Force and the Marines stake their future on a great leap forward to the stealthy F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Navy is taking what one officer called “baby steps” into the future: a careful, incremental upgrade of electronic warfare systems to jam enemy radar instead of just hiding from it. The fleet is moving, slowly but surely, from 1960s-vintage EA-6B Prowlers carrying 1970s-vintage jamming pods — complete with vacuum tubes — to supersonic EA-18G Growlers armed, as of 2020, with a digital Next-Generation Jammer.

Despite persistent rumors the Navy will cut back its F-35 purchase, the service remains officially committed to a carrier-launched version of the F-35, the F-35C. They’re just not counting on the F-35 to penetrate increasingly sophisticated air defenses on its own. Keep reading →

Published December 6, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Will Stealth Survive As Sensors Improve? F-35, Jammers At Stake

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[Corrected 9:35 pm with a note about the EC-130 Compass Call] Is stealth still America’s silver bullet? Or are potential adversaries’ radars getting too smart for US aircraft to keep hiding from them?

That’s literally the trillion-dollar question, because the US military is investing massively in new stealth aircraft. At stake in this debate are not just budgets but America’s continued ability to project power around the world. Keep reading →

Published November 27, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Navy’s Move To Growler 70% Complete; Build-Up Reflects Stealth Doubts

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WHIDBEY ISLAND, WASHINGTON: “Every two weeks, we get another Growler,” Cmdr. Christopher Middleton said at the Navy’s electronic warfare hub here. The Navy target is to buy 114 EA-18G Growler aircraft. And it’s those Growler aircraft that will be the cutting edge of future Naval strikes against future “anti-access area denial” defenses like those being built by China.

To break through such defenses, the Navy is very publicly working on a joint “AirSea Battle” concept with the Air Force, but the two services have taken starkly different approaches to defeating enemy radar. Keep reading →

Published November 15, 2012 at 9:00 AM

Chinese Air Force Tries Hard But Plays Catch-Up With US; Watch PLA Espionage

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NATIONAL HARBOR: China‘s air force is laboring mightily to improve both its planes and its personnel — causing much American concern– but it has a long way yet to go.

The People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) is becoming “much smaller but much more technologically sophisticated,” said Phillip Saunders, director of the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at National Defense University, in a talk Monday afternoon at the Air Force Association’s annual conference here. Keep reading →

Published September 18, 2012 at 1:45 PM

Drones Need Secure Datalinks To Survive Vs. Iran, China

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LAS VEGAS: Drones rule the skies over Afghanistan. But the next war may be a different story. “We’re fighting cavemen that aren’t shooting back,” said Lt. Col. Kevin Murray. “That’s not where we’re going.”

An enemy more high-tech than the Taliban — which doesn’t take much — could jam or hack the datalinks used to control American drones, or just plain shoot them down. Last year, Iran reportedly brought down a RQ-170 spy drone with a cyber attack. To survive in unfriendly skies, Murray said, unmanned aircraft must be “joint, common, interoperable, and survivable — and we are none of those things right now.” Keep reading →

Published August 10, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Lockheed Dismisses $1 Trillion Estimate For F-35 JSF

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FIGHTER DEMONSTRATION CENTER, ARLINGTON, VA: Lockheed Martin executives gathered to tout their F-35 Joint Strike Fighter dismissed a widely reported Pentagon estimate that the aircraft would ultimately cost $1.1 trillion to develop, build, and operate over 55 years. In fact, they argued, the F-35 will cost less to operate than the airplanes it will replace — a highly controversial claim.

“Lockheed Martin believes this aircraft is going to be about the same or even less to operate over the life of the program,” said Robert Rubino, a former Navy pilot who now heads the Navy portion of the Lockheed F-35 program. In the DoD estimate, he said, “they were using legacy data, legacy models” that don’t account for how the F-35 was designed with ease of maintenance and affordability in mind: “They don’t give credit for any of those enhancements.” Keep reading →

Published July 11, 2012 at 3:45 PM

Obama Should Copy Nixon: Avoid Foreign Conflicts, Use Allies, Invest in R&D

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WASHINGTON: Nixon, Ford, and Carter aren’t anyone’s three favorite presidents. But defense policymakers today could learn something from how they handled the hard times of the 1970s: They shifted costly security burdens to foreign partners while pulling US forces out, and they cut defense budgets generally while protecting long-term investments in “seed corn” technologies that would pay off later, like stealth then or robotics now.

Those are some surprising conclusions of a report on “Strategy In Austerity” being released today by Andrew Krepinevich and his co-authors at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Looking at both US and British history, the report argues that current prophesies of American decline are overstated. We’ve been in dire geostrategic and economic straits before, Krepinevich and company write, but we still managed to strategize our way out — and it didn’t take Founding Father-class leadership to do it. Keep reading →

Published June 21, 2012 at 9:30 AM

F-35 Program Head Expresses ‘Great Confidence’ in Stealth, Sensors

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The program executive officer for the problem-plagued F-35 said Thursday he has “great confidence” the multi-service fighter can deliver the oft-promised stealth and the sophisticated package of sensors. Keep reading →

Published March 8, 2012 at 7:43 PM

Brits Bringing ‘Star Trek’ Tech To Battlefield

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Washington: What was once science-fiction could become reality on the modern battlefield — cloaking technology that can make huge weapons virtually “disappear” — at least to sensors searching for them.

British company BAE Systems will debut the system, known as ADAPTIV, 10 days from now at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference here. It is based on an interlocking set of individual tiles that are attached to the outside of virtually any military vehicle, creating a chain-mail like protective coating. Keep reading →

Published September 30, 2011 at 1:28 PM